e-Assessment Review (2010)

The electronic submission of course project has been completed. The project was divided into a number two objectives.

1. The use a coversheet to more efficiently manage student physical submission of assignments. This was a pilot project in the Faculty of Engineering and Design. The system required students to print off a coversheet via SAMIS on the web and submit this with their assignment. The coversheet includes QR Code, which was scanned by Departmental Admin Staff. When scanned SAMIS was updated with the submission details, students emailed a confirmation and a Business Object Report run to identify who has not submitted. The pilot was very well received by both students and staff. The pilot has been scaled up as a service, with other Faculties using it for 2010/11

The report is available from: http://opus.bath.ac.uk/18795/

The use of Moodle for online submission of assignments

This set of activities aimed to identify how the Moodle Assignment activity is currently being used at the University of Bath, what people would want a system to do, and how other institutions have set up their assignment activity. The primary aim was a landscape study. This has been completed and a number of reports have been written. These are available from the e-Assessment review blog (http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/eassessreview/). The reports have fed into staff development in the terms of recommending departmental strategies to meet their needs, and starting to future proof Bath’s needs with Moodle 2.0

Use of Moodle to upload assignments has almost doubled over the last academic year and a growing interest in resources recently developed by the e-Learning team to support online submission of work suggests that this trend is likely to continue in the future.

As part of the ongoing e-Assessment Review, staff and student opinions have been sought on the future functionality that may be required from an online submission system. A report on “Future functionality required from an online submission system for student work” is now available in OPUS at http://opus.bath.ac.uk/19610/

This report sets out potential needs with regard to functionality, as requested by University of Bath Moodle users. It forms a basis for discussions to establish user priorities and will feed into conversations around ongoing and possible future developments by the e-Learning Team and the wider Bath community.

Also clarified in the report are details of the functionality that is currently available for online submission and developments that are planned by the e-Learning Team for implementation in the near future.

Information from recently generated server reports has shown a significant increase in the use of the Moodle Assignment activity within the last academic year.

Online submission of work looks likely to have doubled on 2008-2009 usage by the end of this year and has seen a marked growth in use since the upgrade from Moodle 1.5 to Moodle 1.9 in June 2008. The newer version saw the introduction of an enhanced Assignment activity which allowed for feedback to be provided on student submissions of work.

The e-Learning team are delighted that Moodle’s performance has been consistently stable during the second part of this academic year, especially when taking into account this rise in online submission of student work.

In the light of this year-on-year increase and the growing interest that has been shown in the Moodle assignment activity for providing for online submission of work, the team will continue to monitor demand and usage to ensure that Moodle’s performance remains consistent.

Data on the times that assignments are uploaded to Moodle show that there are pronounced peaks in usage during the day.  It appears that many assignment activities in Moodle have been created with deadlines of midday, the end of the working day (5pm) or around midnight.

As the use of the assignment activity increases in coming years, it may be beneficial to bear these peak times in mind when making choices about when to set assignment deadlines.

[Please note that the two graphs above have been generated from data generated from Moodle server reports run on 5 May 2010.]

Should users have any questions related to any of the items raised within this blog post, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the e-Learning team at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

“Online submission: How Moodle can drive wider institutional change in an HEI” will be presented by Vic Jenkins (Learning Technologist, Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office) and Rachel Wood (e-Learning Development Officer, Faculty of Engineering) this week at Moodle Moot 2010.

To find this presentation on Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) search for the tag ‘eatbath’ or follow this link.

Resources created by the e-Learning team and discussed in the presentation are available from the following project report: Factors to consider for the effective use of the Moodle assignment activity

If you would like to discuss any of the ideas or issues mentioned in the presentation or would like to talk to us about our experiences with online submission using Moodle at the University of Bath, we would be very interested in hearing from you. Feel free to leave your comments on this blog post or contact us on v.k.jenkins@bath.ac.uk or r.wood@bath.ac.uk.

If you are thinking of using Moodle for the online submission of work, then the report on ‘Factors to consider for the effective use of the Moodle assignment activity’ (now available in OPUS at http://go.bath.ac.uk/siro) will be of interest.

This report investigates use of the Moodle assignment activity at the University of Bath, with a particular focus on its adoption for submitting student work online.

It highlights the factors that need consideration when introducing the Moodle assignment activity for submission of work and provides a simple and practical starting point for its implementation.

A quick update on progress with the e-Assessment Review.

Progress on work packages

Monitoring physically handed in assignments software: The pilot in Engineering is progressing very well. For more information see – (http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/qrcode). Will deliver by the end of March 2010. Then wait until end of May for a review / reflection.

How is the assignment activity in Moodle being used at the University of Bath?: The report is due for publication in the e-learning area of the OPuS system (http://opus.bath.ac.uk/view/divisions/elearning.html). This is also being presented at MoodleMoot. The question not addressed is, what is the current level of use of the assignment activity, i.e., number of submission points used in Semester 1, 2009/10, the number of assignments which have been submitted) across the system, by month/week/day, and by Dept (category). This needs to be completed by the end of April 2010

Install Moodle-TurnItIn on Test Server: Completed on multimedia, from Norhumbria Learning, needs checking out and installing on Test Server. Should be complete by end of March

What functionality to students / staff want from an online submission system?: Need to start planning, will be led by Vic Jenkins. Need to plan during April, identify people and then run focus groups in May.

How are other UK HEIs managing the online submission process? Have identified a number to approach (City, UCL, Bristol, UWE, Gloucesterhsire, Exeter). Andy will lead.

If you have any questions, please email the e-learning Team (e-learning@bath.ac.uk)

Getting started with e-Assessment, a working paper recently commissioned by the e-Learning Team, is now available in OPUS at http://go.bath.ac.uk/k4uk .

The report investigates different approaches to e-assessment and objective testing, and their implications for teaching and learning.

Advantages and limitations of objective testing are identified and suggestions offered for the effective incorporation of e-assessment into teaching practice.

The e-assessment review was presented at the January 2010 DoS Taught meeting. It seemed to go down relatively well. So discussion around concerns of service reliability (software capacity) for online submission.  This needs to be re-visited. Also, a very interesting discussion about how we manage requests for 3rd party integration. The answer included the procedure about building a business. However, the conversation continued afterwards and it appears there is currently no third party Moodle block. So the solution would involve expose the folder of the submitted assignments be automatically pulled by the third party. Another conversation which needs to be followed up.